


And I?

by depugnare



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Character Study, Episode 4x01, Episode Related, Gen, Ghosts, Past Child Abuse, battle for nassau, murder discussion, season 4, silver's past, sorry the relationships are just mentioned in passing this is silver focused
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 11:23:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17243354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/depugnare/pseuds/depugnare
Summary: When he’s blown off the side of the ship, the last thing he sees is Flint’s horrified face looking down at him from above.Wonders if it’s the fate of all of those closest to Flint to die this way.





	And I?

**Author's Note:**

> this is an old tumblr thing but i really like the writing so i'm posting it here

When he’s blown off the side of the ship, the last thing he sees is Flint’s horrified face looking down at him from above.

Wonders if it’s the fate of all of those closest to Flint to die this way.

Barely has time to suck in a deep breath before he’s plunged beneath the water by the heavy weight of the ladder. His damned, accursed, leg knotted up in one of the openings. He pulls a knife from his belt an nearly bends himself in half to begin sawing at the room, but when he puts his blade to it, it’s a corpse white hand holding him in place.

A hand that leads to Muldoon as he saw him last, soundlessly screaming beneath the water. Silver opens his mouth to scream before realizing he barely has any air to do so. Brings his knife down and starts cutting, closing his eyes against the sight of blood and tendon as he does.

He feels the warmth of blood around him when the grip on his leg lets go, feels the straps slip from his thigh and suddenly he is free of it. Turns his face up and swims for the ship. For air that will be safe from the sight of soldiers frothing at the mouth to shoot men in the water. Worms his way inside.

It’s dark, dark, dark, but he knows his way.  Has known his way ever since his leg was lost  and his blood spilled onto the deck and he was bound to the sea, bound to the life. Crawls his way through debris, through bodies, towards the light he can see above. Towards the sun, the sailor’s most generous lover.

Gasps when his head breaks the surface, air sweet on his tongue as he breathes. Outside there is cannonfire and the screams of the dying, but here there is only the quiet lap of the water. He sighs for a moment, and turns to find of all things, the fucking dairy goat. It bleats and he stares at it. Wonders why it is alive and the man floating dead next to Silver is not.

If it is because the goat has done nothing wrong but be here, or if it was a creature always meant for slaughter and this simply was not its time.

Then another cannonball roars through the hull and there’s water rushing in and he’s scrabbling at wood, pleading, pleading for his life, for the sun, for anything but being trapped in this fucking ship. Anything but the water.

It stops, giving him only enough room to breath and nothing else. He can still hear the crack of gunfire and shouting, so he waits. Clings to the slats above him, ignoring the slick slide of dead flesh as bodies drift by him under the water.

He grows tired, eventually. His fingers struggle to hang on, his hands cramping. But he cannot let go. There are things in the water beneath him he cannot face. Dead things that whisper his name.

“You’ll never get out.”

He looks up, through the slats, and sees the hem of a black skirt. Dread fills him as he leans back to see a nun standing over him.

“You’ll never get out of there,” she hisses at him, face as gnarled and ugly as he remembers. “We could not cast the devil from your body, but now your time has come.”

“Fuck you,” he hisses, curling his lip. “You’re dead.”

“I am,” she says, crouching down. “You killed me.”

He glares up at her through the slats, at her wrinkled, clawlike hands. Hands that used to hold him under the water even when he struggled until he had no strength to do so.

“I didn’t kill you. You died because you were fucking ancient and death did us all a favor.”

She tilts her head, staring down at him.

“You really believe that don’t you?” she asks. “You think I don’t know it was you that put the lye in my wine?”

She stands up with a sneer.

“You killed me. A poor, innocent old woman.”

He remembers the lick of her belt across his back with every click of her tongue against her teeth as she speaks.

“I killed a fucking sadist,” he spits, letting go just as her foot comes down on the slats.

Sinks beneath the water to the sound of her awful laughter.

–

He hides beneath an overturned longboat until it’s silent. Until he no longer hears screaming or the shouts of military men. His arms ache, but he slips beneath the water, and knows the sun has long since set when he can see nothing. Swims blindly out a few feet and surfaces. Around him there’s the sickly, wet slap of bodies being pushed against the hulls of sunken ships and a minefield of debris he’ll have to navigate. He grabs a piece of floating wood, testing that it will hold him, and starts the long paddle to shore.

It’s decidedly slower than he’d like with only one foot to steer himself with, and he tires easily, exhausted from everything else today. But he thinks of Flint and Madi waiting for him and keeps going, praying that whatever comes out at night to feed in these waters will choose the freshly dead over him.

He kicks until he can’t, and the shoreline is still a mile away. All he can do is cling to the piece of wood and gasp for breath, his legs like lead.

“You cannot die here.”

He jumps, turning to look over his shoulder. A boy sits perched on the back of a dead man, eyes bright in the dark. Silver grits his teeth.

“What do you want?”

The boy shifts, elbows propped on his knees as he looks at him. 

“You know what I want. I want you to live. So keep swimming, lest the sharks confuse you for one of the dead.”

“And why should I believe you?”

The boy tilts his head, dark hair framing his face.

“Without you, there is no me.”

Silver shivers and turns around, urging his legs to move so he can get away from the spectre.

“If you die, we both die,” the boy says, now siting on a crate floating in front of him. “That wouldn’t be good. You’re the last person who even remembers me.”

“Go away.”

“I can’t go away. You killed me. I’m yours now.”

He glares up at him.

“I didn’t kill you. You simply weren’t relevant anymore.”

The boy’s gaze sharpens, eyes narrowing as he looks down at him.

“How can I not be relevant to you? Don’t you know who I am? Say it.”

“John Silver,” Silver grits out, curling his lip. The boy stares back, eyes reflecting the moonlight better than they had any right to. Any human ability to. It was like being watched by a jackal in the night.

“That’s not my name. Say it.”

“No.”

“Say it,” the boy hisses, and now he’s perched on Silver’s shoulder’s, thin hands fisted in his hair, pulling it back until his throat is bare. “ _Say it!_ ”

“Solomon Little,” he spits out, nails digging into the wood. The boy laughs and it’s like iron against stone.

“I was beginning to wonder if you’d forgotten.”

“How could I forget my own name?” Silver says, glaring up at the boy, who stares back with the same blue eyes. He rolls off of Silver’s shoulders and into the water, black hair an inky halo around his head as he floats on his back.

“You’ve done it before. You’re doing it now. Long John Silver leaves room for no other. You must leave me out here in the water.”

The boy turns to look at him.

“You must leave John Silver here. There will be no room for him and Long to exist within you. Only one could survive the swim to shore after everything. Only one will have the resolve needed to do what you need to do.”

“How could you know?”

“Because I know everything about you,” he says, smiling slick and sharp in the dark. “And you killed me for it. It’s what you always do.”

A moment of quiet, only the waves for sound, and then Silver reaches forward, puts his hand on the boy’s head and starts to push down.

—

Afterwards they will say that when John Silver fell into the sea, not all of him returned.

That what emerged was no longer human, only the remnant of one. That he had died and been brought back to save them.

That he had gone through trials to be what they needed.

When John Silver finally crawls from the water, exhausted and filthy, and he sees a man waiting to kill him in the shadows, it is not Israel Hands he’s running from.

It’s not his face that makes him breathless with terror. It’s not his hands that reach out to grab him, to kill him.

When he wakes up the next morning there is no fear in his heart. No exhaustion in his limbs. It’s easy enough to twist his face into a convincing expression of confusion, to make his voice tremble with uncertainty.

But when Israel Hands asks why he he should care who he is, he smiles and looks up at him.

“I am no one, from nowhere, belonging to nothing.”

And for the first time in his life, it was not a lie.


End file.
